However arcane and mystical it may seem, the Aevum persists in the practice of the modern business corporation, the etymology of which derives from corpus, the Latin word for body, and a key element of which is that it can in principle endure in perpetuity, independently of changes in ownership or management. In this, actually, the business corporation is modeled on the university — the oldest definitions of which, as Kantorowicz said in his underappreciated 1950 text on academic freedom, is the universitas magistrorum et scholarium, “The Body Corporate of Masters and Students.”
Kantorowicz takes up this point in Chapter VI of The King’s Two Bodies. Like the king in medieval political theology, he writes there, the professors and students who comprise the medieval university have not one but two bodies. The university’s body natural is comprised of the mortal members who at any given moment carry out its definitive mission, the pursuit of truth. In just the same way that “Supreme Court judges are the Court” and “ministers together with the faithful are the Church,” as he put it in 1950, “the professors together with the students are the University.”
A new and different picture of the university comes into focus. The university has no existence above and beyond its constituent members, yet doesn’t die when those constituent members die. Just like the sovereign, therefore, it has a body politic which is neither eternal nor ephemeral, but persists in the strange in-between of the Aevum, this perpetual “now” that eddies at the threshold where immanence and transcendence become indistinct. When you think of the university, don’t think of buildings and campus greens. Just like every other corporate body, the university combines within itself a plurality of successors, “braced by Time and through the medium of Time.”
As chance would have it, Kantorowicz was a close personal friend of Justice Frankfurter, and accepted an invitation to dine with Frankfurter in April 1957, during the very months that Frankfurter would have been reviewing “The Open Universities” and writing his famous concurrence to Sweezy.
What do we see if we read “The Open Universities” and The King’s Two Bodies together? A composite portrait of the university’s double life. The former imagines it as a place of openness and exchange, defined by its reach across cultures and convictions. The latter reveals it as a form built to last, defined by its continuity across generations. One welcomes the world; the other resists the erosion of time. The latter’s Aevum is to the former’s four freedoms what a keystone is to a stone arch: It provides them with their overarching form, sustaining their structural integrity over time.